Making Change

Abstract This chapter reviews the arguments for the role of honor in moral revolutions, stressing the role of social movements with identities organized around their aims. Using the examples of anti-footbinding in China and the abolitionists in Great Britain, the chapter shows that a movement will be successful if it creates an identity, such as an abolitionist, through a shift in attitudes in society. Abolitionism encompassed a wide range of social classes, who were ashamed of the slave trade. The chapter proposes that a similar shift in attitudes in society may well occur, with regard to the urgent environmental climate crisis that the world is now facing. What may work, the historical evidence suggests, is the development of ‘green’ identities around a small set of relatively well-defined aims.